


Nights On The Nintey-Sixth Inhabitable Planet

by 50artists



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-11-09
Packaged: 2018-08-24 07:23:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8363041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/50artists/pseuds/50artists
Summary: Exactly a year after waking up on the desert planet E96 with no memory of her past life, Rey is approached by "Jessika Pava". Apparently, Jess knew her before the memory loss. It's suspicious. But Rey would do anything to escape E96





	1. Background Information

E96 was too busy for Rey’s tastes, but she had no money and no ride. She was stuck. Every day she woke up at six, worked until nine in the evening, ate, then slept until the next morning. Tedious but reliable.

Some days the pilots would come and watch her repairs, and although she used to be insulted by their lack of trust, she came to look forward to the brief encounters; all of them had stories about bizarre corners of the galaxy, and could talk for hours about flying and engineering and the differences between one ship and another. Rey could probably pass a pilot’s theory test with all that she knew. None of them stayed long on E96 and Rey would watch the ships leaving the atmosphere with sharp jealousy.

What would it be like to fly a ship? She spent all day repairing them, but she had no idea.

“It’s like learning to see for the first time,” one of the pilots had described when Rey asked.

“What?”

"Like… I never knew it was missing from my life until I actually did it.”

Rey felt something missing from _her_ life. It was nice to think that, in the future, she could learn to fly and plug up her mental gaps. Opportunities were scarce on E96. She couldn’t stay outside for long - even with tinted glasses and wrappings covering her arms, Rey had the ugly kind of white skin that burnt after only a few minutes in the sun. On E96, so hot it was only just acceptable for human colonisation, she felt as though she’d been damned.

Still, life wasn't bad. Rey had a flat overlooking the desert. She almost never went hungry and her job kept her physically fit.

Often, she thought of her family. She wondered if they were alive, and whether she got on with them, and speculated about her few hazy memories. “It’s common for sufferers of retrograde amnesia to lose memories from a given period of time, but retain an impression of their youth,” the AI doctor had told her, “and I can offer a discount on memory resets if you find this upsetting. Wipe everything completely blank.” Rey had declined. She knew she had a brother, or maybe a cousin; she remembered games they used to play in a big, lush garden that could only have existed on Earth. Once, she had broken her left index finger by falling out of a tree with him, and to this day Rey could see the crookedness it caused when she compared her hands.

Maybe Rey would never know about her past - in the year since she ‘woke up’, she'd accepted that. Only one goal really motivated her:

Some day, she would save the money to leave E96 forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know no one in october 2016 cares abt the jess/rey ship... i know. but i like this so im posting it. also i put no effort into making this vaguely resemble canon, so its only really 'fanfiction' in that im using names and very basic character elements.
> 
> my tumblr is xen-izat.


	2. Chapter 2

“Hey! You!”

Someone was shouting at her. Yes, definitely at _her_ \- the street was empty. Rey tried to walk faster.

“Wait up - I’m sorry - wait a second!”

Their footsteps got quicker, and Rey was just about to break into a run when a hand clamped down on her shoulder. “Rey, it’s me! Calm down!”

Turning, she found a complete stranger gripping her coat, their expression happy and slightly wild, as if they couldn’t believe Rey was real.

Rey glared. “Do I know you?” she snapped, and wrenched the hand away

“Hey, come on, it’s been a few years, but I haven’t changed that much. It’s me, Pava! Jessika Pava?”

A cold feeling began settling in Rey’s gut. The stranger almost seemed familiar - maybe this was a trick, someone who’d found out that Rey was an amnesiac and decided to profit off it. Or maybe it was legitimate. The stranger had a believable face. They were actually quite attractive, with pretty brown eyes and a genuine smile that was beginning to fade as Rey failed to react.

“Oh God, you don’t remember me. It’s cool, I know we never really spoke, I just…”

“Sorry,” Rey said without thinking.

“Nah, it’s okay, there were loads of us back then.”

“Right.”

“So…” The stranger ( _J_ _essika_ , Rey told herself) smiled sheepishly, revealing a row of perfectly white teeth. “What are you doing all the way out here? Not exactly your scene, all these long, hot days. I hear it reaches forty-five degrees celsius every day, that’s so mental!”

"I never liked the heat.”

“Exactly! So, what are you doing out here?”

Normally Rey planned the routine of her life down to the second, but here she was, Saturday evening on her way home from work, with the power to change her entire life.

She swallowed, and made a split second decision

“I’m just doing a bit of work as a mechanic,” she found herself saying, “but I was actually looking for a lift out of here.”

By some miracle, her voice didn’t waver.

Jessika grinned. “Hey, just come to E27 with me, I’m setting off in the morning. We can talk on the way. You disappeared so suddenly, I can’t wait to tell you all the fucking drama you’ve missed.”

Rey clenched her hands to stop them shaking. “Okay. Sounds good.”

“Awesome!” Rather than getting annoyed, the prospect of a passenger seemed to make Jessika perk up, and Rey remembered how some of the pilots would tell her about their loneliness and solipsism on long flights. “Great, want to meet at the port? I’ll be ready at noon.”

"That’s fine.” Rey forced a weak smile. “I’ll, um, see you then.”

“Okay! I’m sorry I can’t hang around, places to be and all that. See you tomorrow!” Without wasting any more words, Jessika strode off, disappearing back into the darkness of E96’s suburbia.

It took twice as long as normal for Rey to get home. She felt unreal. Only once she arrived, and unlocked her door with the key she kept in the same pocket every day, did the panic begin to set in. “What am I doing?” she mumbled to herself as she made a beeline for her bed, “what am I doing what am I doing what am I doing.”

For a few minutes the chanting helped, then a new thought occurred to her. “My job… I need to quit my job. We’re going to E27. I’ll need to get a new job once I’m there. I should just kill myself. I just want to die. I want to die I want to die I want to die…”

She felt so alone, curled up in her bed, still wearing work clothes. She was in one of hundreds of flats, in one of thousands of apartment buildings, in one of millions of inhabited planets across the galaxy. Within all the unimaginable human life, Rey existed separately. No family or friends or even acquaintances to notice if she died. “I want to die,” she whispered again, “I can’t do this.”

Then she forced her eyes closed and laid still until she fell asleep.

In the morning Rey considered her flat. It was empty apart from a few packets of Nutri-Powder and her clothes.

Everything she owned fit in a small backpack. She paid rent daily - it was only ten credits - and if she didn’t return to the flat this evening, it would automatically register as vacant until someone else began using it. She decided not to formally quit her job. If she got stood up at noon, she needed something to fall back on.

An adventure. She had to see this as an adventure. Even if she got fucked over by Jessika, and this was all an elaborate human trafficking scheme or an organ harvesting farm in disguise, it was better than the monotony of life in her mechanic job on E96. With that thought, Rey set off.


	3. Chapter 3

“So, we wiped her memory and left her on E96 - that’s a trading place, far enough from Earth that she’d never show up again.”

Jessika regarded the man with unconcealed dislike. “But now it’s convenient for _you_ that Rey returns,” she summarised, “you want me to fetch her back. Like she’s a parcel. That girl’s not gonna want anything to do with you.”

The room was thick with cigarette smoke. It filled every breath and curled around the furniture, turning the air almost blue. Jessika’s eyes stung as she forced herself not to cough. Across from her, leant over the table with his fag in one hand and a false smile on his face, the man feigned injury at Jessika’s tone. “Come on,” he said, “this mess isn’t _my_ fault. If anything, the girl should be thankful I’m getting her off that planet.”

“Whatever. How much are you paying?”

“A thousand credits now, ten thousand more once that girl is safely back on Earth.”

“No way!” Jessika grit her teeth. “She might be dead! A thousand barely covers the fuel I’ll need to get there. Give me the ten grand up front.”

“Well…”  His eyes narrowed. “Maybe two thousand.”

“A new engine would cost two thousand on its own.”

“In that case,” the man said with finality, “you better hope you don't need a new engine. I’ll agree to two thousand up front, nine thousand when I have the girl. But I better have that girl.”

“As if I’d sabotage Kylo.” Already, in the corner of her vision, Jessika saw the transfer coming through. Two thousand credits. That would do her nicely. “Look mate, I don’t have a death wish. The Rey girl will be back on Earth in a couple of weeks, maximum. I’ll pretend to be an old friend, or something, maybe offer her a better job…”

“Just make it happen. Now, get out of my office.”

“My pleasure.”

As always, Jessika used the back entrance, leading through a few winding corridors then suddenly opening onto the crowded streets of London. She tried not to look uncomfortable. Soon she was engulfed and became anonymous, pressed into the business people who swirled through without glancing at her face. “I fucking hate that guy,” she said aloud, but no one turned to stare at her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i get writers block very badly, so even though i know where im going, its difficult for me to write it out... the cure is to write chapters super short like this i guess
> 
> my tumblr is xen-izat


	4. Chapter 4

Before she set off, Jess was given pictures, DNA samples and a personality analysis (probably now obsolete). She also got a disapproving lecture from Poe.

“I thought you were done with Kylo,” he hissed as Jessika prepared their best ship, “you said after that last job, you were finished.”

“It’s ten thousand credits, Poe.”

Although he was unhappy, the money silenced him - both of them knew what ten thousand could buy. It was more than they needed.

As she left Earth’s atmosphere, Jessika imagined she could see Poe as a tiny dot, somewhere in the middle of the brown mosaic that made up England. The journey to E96 was only a couple of weeks - she’d been all the way out to E509 before, smuggling nanomedicine, so the ninety-sixth inhabitable planet wasn’t too daunting.

According to a previous internet search, E96 was too hot for comfort and the only ‘inhabitable' areas were overcrowded. Jess frowned at the results as she re-loaded the data. It seemed very likely Rey was dead. E96 was barren and the culture was hostile.

Jessika sighed. She already had two thousand credits. If Rey was dead, that would just have to do.

For the next sixteen days she stayed in her ship. It was on the small side, with only a few metres squared of free space for her to sleep and exercise. Most days blended together, but one memorable incident occurred: trawling through her data on Rey, Jessika found a pre-memory wipe video of the girl speaking. It was five minutes long and heavily pixelated, filmed at an odd angle as if taken in secret.

Intrigued, she set it to play.

The girl on the screen was attractive in a way that still images couldn’t quite capture. Something about how she held herself, the way she spoke and held her head up, gave her a stronger presence. “-ut anyway,” she was saying, “even if he was my brother, I wouldn’t care.”

“Why’s that?” A voice offscreen, deeper and slower than Rey’s, made her expression switch to one of annoyance.

“Because he’s not the same person now! Anything we once shared, it’s meaningless, all the time we spent together as kids - I still hate him! I’m not ever going to forgive him!”

A third person began to speak, their words a mumble just too far off for Jessika to hear.

“You would say that,” Rey snapped, “since you’re just like him. All of you can go to hell.”

She turned, whipping an unusual hairstyle that Jessika recognised from photographs, and strode out of frame. The remaining minutes of footage were the same empty shot of a wall.

Jessika replayed the video.

Why would someone film this? Probably as evidence against Rey, she realised with an uncomfortable feeling - video proof that she was a traitor to Kylo despite their shared blood. This would more than justify a mind wipe.

Feeling unsettled, she’d closed the video down and didn’t search any deeper through the data she’d been given.

 

~*~*~

 

In a few more days Jessika arrived on E96. From there on, arranging an ‘accidental' meeting was too easy. Fifty credits gave Jess a peek into some low-ranking official’s data. Rey didn’t have a single privacy filter in place, and Jessika read through her medical record, her employment record, then found her address in temporary flats down the city’s East side. It was all perfect.

Things only started going wrong after she met Rey.

The girl was unrecognisable from the video Jessika had seen. In fact, Rey walked straight past her, and it took Jessika a few moments to realise and shout “hey, you!” at Rey’s quickly retreating figure. “Wait - I’m sorry - wait up!”

If anything, she began moving quicker, and Jess grabbed almost desperately at her coat. “Rey, it’s me! Calm down!”

Slowly, and with an air of intense hostility, Rey turned to face her.

Up close, seeing Rey’s face was even stranger, subtly different from the pictures but definitely the same person. She’d got thinner in the last year. All the bones of her shoulder felt defined beneath Jessika’s hand. In dim lighting her face looked like something out of a film, stark shadows falling down the contours of her cheekbones and nose. Fuck. If only they’d met on Earth, and if only Jessika wasn’t about to screw this girl over.

“Do I know you?”

Jessika let go of Rey’s shoulder sheepishly.

“Hey, come on, it’s been a few years but I haven’t changed that much. It’s me, Pava! Jessika Pava?”

Motherfuck. This is why Jessika shouldn’t be assigned jobs with pretty girls. She’d even thought of a fake name, ‘ _Monica Ivanova_ ’, to go with her backstory of working with Rey in E27’s astatine mines. Lucky for her, Rey barely seemed to notice. The rest of the conversation was similarly unnatural. Although Rey leapt at the chance to go to E27, she showed no enthusiasm, and spent the whole time looking faintly annoyed. It made Jessika paranoid. Wasn’t this whole thing too easy? She’d revised pages of personality traits and made an elaborate backstory so she could prove her legitimacy to Rey, but the girl never asked for any proof, or even hinted at her own memory loss.

Did Rey realise how vulnerable she was? Going off with a complete stranger to a planet she’d never visited. Jessika could be planning to kill her or sell her or kidnap her…

Hell, Jessika _was_ planning to kidnap her.

She grimaced at the thought. Tomorrow, she’d get Rey on her ship, knock her out and keep her unconscious until they reached Earth. Jess could just feel her conscience trying to get in the way of those ten thousand credits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as i wrote this i realised… i am not a good writer. it’s okay though i have time to improve. Also i’ve actually had a couple of comments on this which is absolutely amazing, it probably only took a few second of peoples time but without it id have given up on posting this and be saving it to google docs like everything else i do.
> 
> at the time of writing the us election is happening so good luck america
> 
> my tumblr is xen-izat


End file.
